Controlling the ebook was easiest on the Clie by a long shot, in either hand, due to the absolutely brilliant jog-dial. The Universal has a rocker switch, but trying to use it for pageturning usually involves overshooting your page by miles because it takes too much force to use and repeats too quickly — but even with that fixed it would not be a match for the jog dial.

The screen is clearly best on the Universal — something with *at least* that pixel density would be good. To be useful for webbrowsing as well, I think 1024-wide would be better than 800-wide. The screen on the Clie wasn’t bad, but the fonts available let it down a bit. The screen on the 3650 was small, but it’s relatively high-dpi and so it’s nearly as good to read on as the SJ22 is. I’ll take high-dpi over sheer size any day (especially if the rest of the device shrinks with it).

Formatwise: I’m for convertible tablet, in whichever size. The problem there is that the typical hinge is weak. I think it might be good to explore a form factor where converting to tablet involves flipping the screen all the way back (flipping the base keyboard down, rather than having it in the middle). This is, of course, not really something that is within Microsoft’s purview, but a manufacturer might read this as well.

In re: battery life, it’d have to be PDA-like, rather than notebook-like, although my latest PDA is a bit of a batteryhog itself. For extended use (during, say, holidays) I’d like the ability to charge the battery by connecting whatever voltage I’ve got on the charge connector (at the very least 5V-6V) — one thing that came in really handy was a 4xAA battery holder with a charge cable attached. Even in darkest Transsylvania (literally), you can always get AA batteries, and you can usually find an internet cafe where you can plug your USB-charge cable in while you surf.

Connectivity out the wazoo — at least Bluetooth (and maybe IR) and WiFi, but preferably with an integrated UMTS(/HSDPA)/GPRS(/EDGE) radio in. Actual phone capability is more or less optional (perhaps just with BT headset). Hell, if you can fit in a GPS receiver while we’re at it, go for it (but the phone and especailly GPS functions, like in current PDAs, are probably best left more or less to the individual hardware manufacturer). But include a program to easily activate and deactivate all of that, for powersaving reasons.

I would not be averse to a version of the tablet that uses Flash rather than or in addition to a spinning hard drive (8GB CF is fairly affordable these days — Incidentally, SD and size permitting CF readers are a capital idea) — although I suspect you’d need to up the ram a bit and modify the OS to make properly sure you don’t trash the flash cells unnecessarily. Perhaps OS off Flash with a small scratch RAM disk for those bits that just work better with a ‘disk’ and a larger 1.8″ ipod-style hard drive that only activates when you’re doing things that need it. I suspect that this is beyond what Windows XP can do without major rewriting that’s no longer an option with Vista on the horizon.

A lot of this is probably not yet an option wth the current state of the art, price/performance wise, but I suspect that a device such as I describe could be made at a reasonable price (say, the ~1k that the Universal costs now) within two or three years.

Good readability inside & outside for those of us that no longer have 20 year old eyes.

Battery life must last through one days typical reading, ability to use microdrives and sd cards a big plus as would be USB host capability.

Instant on is a key element. Would really like to see ebook reading, mp3 and movie playing all bypass the operating system.

Easy adjust of brightness.

Like the idea of tabbed viewing of books, magazines, rss feeds – that was a superb idea.

Take advantage of the tablet interface and create gestures for book navigation as well (like in the Maxthon program, highly useful, so much so that I try to use gestures in other programs)

1. The ability to rotate the screen through 180 degrees in 90 degree increments is important (or 360 degrees if buttons exist on only one side of the device). Button association should rotate with the screen (so top is always top, and left is always left, etc.)

2. Sometimes I read in the bathtub by placing my PDA in a Ziploc bag. All buttons should be manipulable while inside a bag.

3. I frequently read in bed in a darkened room. Even at its lowest setting my iPaq generates enough light to trouble my wife’s sleep, and can even be used as a flashlight. It is as important for the screen to be capable of being reduced to a *very* faint glow as it is for the screen to be readable in full sunlight.

4. Even with high-capacity batteries and low-power mode there will be times when you just can’t get to a wall socket. The device should accept standard AA or AAA alkaline batteries. If I were designing the device I would design it to use standard AA or AAA batteries, or their NiMH or Li counterparts, as its primary power source.

5. A standard USB port with drivers to accept keyboards, mice, USB wireless adapters, and GPS receivers is highly desirable. Indeed, the lack of wireless capability would not be a show stopper for me if I knew that they could be added through a standard USB port. The USB port could be used for synchronization with a PC, and could probably even be used as a battery charger.

1) Please, please work with Libraries (and schools!) right from the get-go so that e-books for this reader can easily be acessible to everybody, not just the rich. I personally know that libraries are part of Microsoft’s vision – and they are a crucial piece of the solution to get e-books into the mainstream.

2) Unicode – make the device totally unicode compliant so that no matter what language (even non-roman alphabet ones!), any book can easily be read without being a technical genius.

3) Include a nice, smooth autoscroller! I use mine all the time and is one of the main reasons I use Mobi-Pocket instead of Microsoft Reader. One use is hands-free reading during lunch!

Also how well the controls work with my favorite ebook reading software matters (ie. I don’t want to hunt for a keyboard arrow key to turn a page.)

1. Long batt life (8+ hrs of *real* usage, such as full backlight, wifi etc)
2. Indoor/Outdoor viewing display (whether you use transflective or what not, consumers don’t care a hoot, just make sure it can be seen, I don’t care if its called ABZ912 or RealDisplay)
3. Support for multiple DRM format *AND* open formats like HTML and text etc.
4. SD card support. Its cheap, reliable. period
5. Wifi (at least support 802.11b)

OPTIONAL:
1. Listen to mp3, audio books
2. Watch Video (very optional. Personally I don’t need it)

I’m not into gadgets much but this one has me all excited. I’ve been blogging about it for three days http://learnandteachonline.com/node/346

Ditto to a lot of what’s been said. One thing you might want to take into account that I haven’t seen mentioned is business use of devices for leisurely offline reading. So often if something like a work-related article is quite long you’d like to be able to curl up with it, like you would with a book or magazine. Lots of general business information , as well as vertical business info is available in PDF, and I have a feeling that’s going to be the main file format for business use, so Acrobat Reader would have to work perfectly.

I also work in publishing (for the National Safety Council, where we put out some 20 newsletters, three magazines and 100 books). As a practical matter a vertical publisher very often will not want to take the trouble to reformat the print version of a publication for electronic consumption. So, I’m thinking about page size for a large textbook-sized book or a magazine. It’s probably going to have to be displayed in landscape mode, but it would be really nice to plan how it fits into the shape of your device’s screen, and try to strike the right balance between font size and getting a page on no more than two screens full of text.

Also, for education purposes, you might want to consider some sort of LMS quiz plug-in that can be completed offline then submitted later online.

/amyloo

-bowerbird

First, I would please encourage Microsoft to create software for the Origami that accepted as many of the above-mentioned formats as possible, not just .lit (for MSReader), and to also add .txt, .flv (Flash), .html and .xml (RSS) (and of course OpenReader…but that goes without saying). There’s a real opportunity here that so far no eBook manufacturers have taken – to combine book reading, magazine reading, website reading and RSS feed reading, all into one simple application. This would be an amazing thing, I think – to have one device and one window, where I could tab from the latest Murakami novel to the New York Times, right to my friend’s blog. This will only happen, though, by embracing as many standards as possible, which so far no one has done.

Second, please give us all the great simple benefits that come with reading a paper book: easy and automatic bookmarking of where we left off, when clicking out of a document; the ability to write notes in the margins, and to highlight phrases; the ability to easily turn from “page” to “page” (versus one endless scrolling document). Since you asked, I myself would primarily want to highlight and take notes with a stylus, then turn pages with large friendly buttons, either real or virtual. I have found real resistance among many of my readers to embrace eBooks, mostly for this reason; that to this date, it’s still not as convenient as a paper book or magazine is. Apple closed this gap in music, for example, by creating the combination of iTunes and the iPod; I would love to see the Origami be the first device ever to close this gap with eBooks.

Third, like many others have said here, definitely a way for users to create their own documents. MSReader has a good history of this, though (of making it easy to convert many documents to .lit format, that is), so I imagine you will do the same with the Origami.

Fourth, and I know it’s a little too late for this, but I think the time has finally come where “electronic ink” systems can be taken seriously. This is the number-one reason I hear from my readers, as to why they don’t read eBooks; that no matter how fine the screen, they still simply can’t read it for longer than 30 or 45 minutes in a row, without their eyeballs going crazy. Nothing is ever going to get better with eBooks until this technology is finally improved.

I’ve enjoyed all the different prototypes and videos I’ve now seen of the possible finished product; I wouldn’t really change anything so far viewed, although that may change once I get to interact with the actual device.

Where to get eBooks: That’s another big problem, caused in this case by so many publishing companies not understanding the real strength of eBooks, and implementing them in very wrong ways. But that has nothing to do with Microsoft, and could be another 1,000 words on its own if I get started, so I won’t. In a nutshell – we need a YouTube for electronic books, but a lot of publishers are very threatened by this idea.

That’s it; I’ll make way now for others. Thanks for listening!

[ilikejason at gmail dot com]